So the AP n the Association for project managers have been developing the perfect way to plan and then
do projects for the last hundred or 150 years they've written it all down in P.N. Baalke the project
management body of knowledge and I've simplified that down to a 12 step process just for people who
are doing a small project or just want to get on with doing project management.
These are the key 12 parts of the A.P.M. process.
So if you follow this approach this project management process you should be fine.
Your project should come in on time on budget and correct to the specification.
Step One of the process is to define what your project is.
Be really clear about what you are doing.
And I think Step 1 is the biggest cause of failure for projects if you leave it a bit vague.
There is a risk that when you deliver it people are going to say well that's not what I was imagining
or that's not what I wanted.
So to all agree all the stakeholders agree in writing this is what we're going to have cost quality
and time.
This is how much we're going to spend.
This is what we're going to have in scope and out of scope and also how long is it going to take.
So Step 1 define the project that's really important don't overlook that.
Then you start on the planning steps two to eight are all about having a really good plan.
So the first part of planning step two is to get a list of all the tasks and there is a slight question
about how much granularity to have how small do you go.
Do you just say I'm going to build a house or go to do the kitchen got to do the bathroom the foundations
the roof or do you divide the kitchen down into you know the cooker and the heated floor and the lights.
Or do you go even more detail to use and when a drill hole push the wire through.
So there's a slight question about how detailed to go.
But Step two is to get a list of all the tasks then.
Step three is to estimate those tasks and there are two things to estimate the time and the money.
So how long do we think each task will take to do and what will it cost to do.
And just to clarify what I mean by time because there are two types of time we have to decide how many
hours of work are involved and we've got to estimate that.
But also the elapsed time how many weeks til it's finished.
And those are different things.
Sometimes people talk about DAY.
I'm suspicious about days because if you say well it's a three day job do you mean it's three days of
work or do you mean it's three days of elapsed time till it's finished.
So I like to use hours of work and then weeks of elapsed time.
So I would talk about estimating the time and the money the time is the elapsed time three weeks.
The money is the hours of work plus other costs.
So Step three is to do your estimating step four.
And I'm going to show you this in a bit more detail later.
Step forward is to work out the running order of the tasks.
And this is usually called a network diagram.
What order are we going to do the tasks in Step four is really the heart of your planning process.
That's when you really decide you know are we going to risk buying a building when we haven't got a
permit for that country or are we going to get the furniture before the manager.
Does the manager need to have a say in the furniture.
So Step four is where we think about the interconnections the dependencies between the tasks and we
draw it all out in order.
And it also tells us therefore how long the project's going to take because we can add up the times.
So that's step four then Step Five is to speed up that diagram if necessary because if you add up all
the tasks and it comes to too much then how do we speed it up or we can do that by overlapping some
of the tasks or throwing money at them that kind of thing.
Then we get to step six which is the Gantt Chart.
Now again I'm going to talk about these more later.
But the Gantt chart is basically a series of bars drawn out with the right length so you have you have
a time scale on your diagram.
And so you show each task as a bar and then you can see the whole project drawing out as a series of
bars.
So that's the Gantt Chart.
Step Seven of the 12 step process is then to think about resources because if you've got several bars
all happening at the same time you can look vertically and you can ask yourself Do we have enough resource
to do everything that we want to do on this project.
And we've either got to get more people or perhaps we'll have to move some of those bars later and take
longer.
So Step Seven is to think about the resources for your project and perhaps also for all of your projects
because what if we've got enough for that project.
But unfortunately at the same time as that we've got a couple of other projects happening.
So I have a thing called the ganta of Gants where you look at all your projects and you just check that.
Can we do all the things that we want to do in this time scale.
So at Step 7.
Think about the resources you need for one project and for multiple projects.
Then the final step of the planning is Step 8 which is risk.
So you look at your whole plan and you think what might go wrong with this project.
How likely is it to go wrong.
How serious would it be if it did go wrong and how can we make it less likely or less serious.
So risk and mitigation of risk is Step 8 so that steps 2 to 8 of the 12.
And that's the planning stage of project management.
We then start the project.
Remember if you're doing an gyle you plan and do plan and do plan and do but what we're doing with the
A.P.M. process is that we plan the whole thing and then we do the whole thing.
And you can see how there are benefits and risks of that because there is a risk we all spend ages planning
and when you do the first bet you'll find there's something wrong with your plan.
But if you do plan do plan do then you don't have an overall view of the project and you don't know
how long it's going to take.
So the A.P.M. have decided to do all the planning.
Make sure it's right and then you carry out your plan.
So Step 9 as you carry out your plan you monitor your progress and that's normally done by coloring
in the Gantt chart I'm going to show you this later color in so that you can check the keeping up with
your plan.
And so that is Step 9 Step 10 is where you monitor the money.
So you keep track of how much you've spent.
And again you have to look at whether what you have spent compares favorably with what you should spend
and if you're overspending you can work out what to do.
Step 11 is where we adjust our plan if necessary.
So if we are running behind or overspending at Step 11 we think right what are we going to do about
that.
And of course things always change doing projects.
Sometimes it's outside factors.
Sometimes it's the customer asking for something else but for whatever reason things change during projects
and so step 11 is where we rejig the plan.
And this is where agile people say are well you see you know your process isn't very flexible but actually
it's really flexible because we know we're going to be changing the plan at Step 11.
We've got a whole stack for that and we're absolutely fine with that.
We know that no battle plan withstands contact with the enemy.
But the good thing about having a plan is that if you have to change it you know the effect of the change.
So if a customer says oh can I have an extra page on that website.
You could say absolutely no problem at all to do that.
But it will take a bit longer and it will cost a bit more.
Compared to the original plan at Step 11.
And then finally step 12 is to review the project at the end.
What have we learnt.
Often forgotten very important because it's really the only time that you learn.
You know you think you'll remember for next time but will you.
So Step 12 is where you write down everything you've learned and you store all your reviews in a folder
so that anybody different to you who might be doing a similar project to the one you did can look in
the folder and learn the lessons.
So even if you've learnt it the challenges for the whole organization to learn those lessons and you
can do that if you keep a folder of reviews.
So that's the A.P.M. process and you can see it's four sections really is defining the project.
It's planning the project it's monitoring the project and it's reviewing it at the end.
So that's the ideal way that you would do your project.
But the big question really is what tends to go wrong.